Book Image

Google Web Toolkit 2 Application Development Cookbook

By : Shamsuddin Ahammad
Book Image

Google Web Toolkit 2 Application Development Cookbook

By: Shamsuddin Ahammad

Overview of this book

GWT 2 radically improves web experience for users by using existing Java tools to build no-compromise AJAX for any modern browser. It provides a solid platform so that other great libraries can be built on top of GWT. Creating web applications efficiently and making them impressive, however, is not as easy as it sounds. Writing web applications for multiple browsers can be quite tasking. In addition, building, reusing, and maintaining large JavaScript code bases and AJAX components can be difficult. GWT 2 Application Development Cookbook eases these burdens by allowing developers to quickly build and maintain complex yet highly efficient JavaScript front-end applications in the Java programming language . It tells you how to make web experience all the more thrilling and hassle free, using various tools along with GWT SDK.This book starts with developing an application from scratch. Right from creating the layout of the home page to home page elements including left and right sidebars, to placing tree like navigational menu, menu bars, tool bars, banners, footers are discussed with examples. You will see how to create forms using the Ext GWT library widgets and handle different types of events. Then you will move on to see how to design a database for sales processing systems and learn to create the database in MySQL with the help of easy–to-follow recipes. One of the interesting topics of this book is using JPA in GWT. Using the JPA object in GWT is a challenge. To use them perfectly, a mechanism to convert the JPA object into plain object and vice versa is required. You will see recipes to use entity classes, entity managers, and controller classes in GWT application. You will efficiently create reports with parameters, variables and subreports, and get the report output in both HTML and PDF format using real-world recipes. You will then learn to configure the GlassFish server to deploy a GWT application with database. Finally, learn how to trace speed and improve perfomance in web applications using tracing techniques.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Google Web Toolkit 2 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Creating the left-hand sidebar


In this recipe, we are going to create a sidebar to be placed on the left-hand side of the homepage. This sidebar will be used for navigation.

How to do it...

  1. Define the method getLeftSidebar:

    public ContentPanel getLeftSideBar()
    {
    ContentPanel leftSidebarPanel = new ContentPanel();
    leftSidebarPanel.setHeading("Left Sidebar");
    return leftSidebarPanel;
    }
    
  2. Call the add method of class ContentPanel in the constructor to add the sidebar in the content panel:

    add(getLeftSideBar(), leftSidebarLayoutData);
    

How it works...

The method getLeftSideBar creates a content panel instance and sets a heading Left Sidebar. This heading will be modified later.

The left-hand sidebar created by this method is added in the west region of the main content panel by invoking add(getLeftSideBar(), leftSidebarLayoutData) in the constructor.

See also

  • The Creating the home page layout class recipe

  • The Adding the banner recipe

  • The Adding menus recipe

  • The Creating the right-hand sidebar recipe

  • The...